Thanks to everyone for coming out to our second 3D printing fair back on July 1st. We had even more kids and parents visit than our first event back in May, and they made some fantastic prints.
Before we show off some of the prints, we want to give huge thanks to outgoing senior at Garden Street Academy, Preston Towers. Preston did an excellent job helping everyone make their prints and explaining the technology which he himself learned only a few weeks prior. He’ll be helping us throughout the summer before he starts his freshman year at UC Santa Barbara later this fall. Thanks Preston!
Once again, our iPads and Doodle 3D boxes helped everyone easily make something on our 3D printers.
Heart wand.
Twisted octagonal cylinder made by a high school student visiting from northern California.
This was created by young girl who will be enrolling in the third grade this fall at Garden Street Academy.
In addition to using our Doodle 3D boxes, some kids tried their hand at creating 3D designs using Autodesk’s free 123D Creature app on our iPads. This app is great for getting younger students used to moving objects around in three dimensions. We had some time near the end of the fair, so we were able to print a few of the designs.
What I love is how kids didn’t limit themselves to only making “creatures.” The app lends itself to creating some cool abstract designs as well.
Abstract design created in 123D Creature.
This is a mermaid figure created by Sofia, a current student at Garden Street Academy who will be a fourth-grader this fall.
The photo doesn’t quite do justice to Sofia’s mermaid figure. We posted the object on our Thingiverse page so you can view and rotate the object in three dimensions from within your browser.
Other activities
We were too busy to capture photos, but we also had a potato head station in the makerspace. We laid out potato head parts created by our high school students using Tinkercad, and had a couple of real potatoes available for kids to create their own potato heads.
Some kids also explored Tinkercad, a basic 3D design tool that runs in a web browser. We brought one of our iMacs from the Tech Lab to the makerspace, and some of our visitors ran through the Tinkercad tutorials and played with designing their own 3D objects. I think we might try to have a more formal 3D design workshop later in the summer. Stay tuned.
New logo
One of our parents, Jane Masterson from Sidekick Creative, worked with us to create a logo for GSA Makerspace.
Jane was a pleasure to work with, and we love our new logo. Sidekick Creative also did the graphic art for Garden Street Academy’s annual auction back in March. If you need some graphic design work done, we highly recommend checking them out. Thanks Jane!
